Back in America?

Well I’m back.  Not how I had planned. Not when I planned.  But after spending two years abroad in Burkina I had already learned that we don’t control nearly as much of our lives as we like to think we do.  Control is a luxury.  And in America we are able to afford more of it than other parts of the World, but less of it is as real as we would like to belief.  So let’s go after some concrete examples before I lose you down the rabbit hole. 

In the Peace Corps you leave your friends and family behind and set off into the developing world with your naive ideas of travel, saving the world, and life and dive right in.  You learn a new language or two.  You try to eat new foods.  You get really sick.  You learn that a very small percentage of the world’s population uses toilet paper. And you learn that you in fact don’t know anything.  It’s overwhelming and you feel yourself spinning out of control.  Or at least I did, during my first three months of service in my village.  It was one of those afternoons when I hadn’t interacted with a single person in 3 days because everyone was living out on the fields and the remaining population were too scared to come talk to me.  I don’t know what we would have talked about anyways; I didn’t really speak the language.  And on these afternoons I often brought up the question “Ryan, what the hell did you do?”.  I felt lost and so I went about trying to nail down my life.  Create control.  I developed a daily routine so that all (almost all) my time was spent productively, I aggressively studied French, I dug a garden, I outfitted my home, I maintained my sanity, and by month three I was feeling pretty good about myself.  I had done it, I had exerted myself on my environment and I had won, I had controlled what had happened to me and I would continue to control what happened to me and in that control I felt safe.  Well my first year of service rolled along and every day I continued to pour more of myself into this service, this village, this work, this life.  As each day went by less of me was left in America and more of me started filling the space around me in my village and probably would have continued as such if I hadn’t been given a painful reminder of how little we control in life.

It’s September 2015, a little after I hit my one-year in village mark and everything fell to pieces.  I am going to make the assumption that all you readers closely followed the political events that have unfolded in Burkina over the last two years so I won’t go into details, but this was the Military coup.  I had already weathered a public uprising that had ousted a 27 year dictator so I expected more of the same, but then all of the sudden we were getting calls to pack our house up, and before you knew it we were getting calls to get out and that we were consolidating.  Well that was hard.  Your whole life has to go into boxes in the space of 24 hours and you don’t even have boxes so you can imagine the difficulties.  What about all that control that I had?  All my work? My routines? All of my life that I have poured into this place?  Well that didn’t matter because that’s not how life works.  I was about to lose everything and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.  Not because I did anything wrong, not because I was particularly unlucky, but because that’s just how life works.  It’s this huge uncaring unknowing colossus and we control it about as much as we control…something equally uncontrollable. 

Well that was a tough two weeks, every day not knowing if you stay or if you go.  Calling your friends in village to see how everyone is doing.  Getting good news followed by bad news followed by good news again until finally it was over and we were going home. To village that is.  Well unfortunately that wasn’t the end of my tumult.  A few months after that due to security concerns our travel zones in country were restricted and travel to the capital was reduced and monitored.  Control shrinking.  Or never there to begin with.  And then the terrorist attacks in January shook everything to its core.  Those are the kind of events in life that do nothing but remind everyone that life can’t be controlled. But I guess that’s the point of terrorism?  Well it worked.  Our lives in country were irrevocably changed after that.  The security restrictions, the travel restrictions, the way people looked at us after, and the loss of innocence.  Even a trip to the Market started feeling risky and there were police and metal detectors everywhere. There wasn’t time to think “why me?” or that this was incalculably unlucky that this had to happen during my service, or if only I had served somewhere else, or any of those classic thoughts that come up whenever something terrible happens.  Because at the end of the day, we have no control over it and we’re better off making due with what we do have rather than lamenting that which we don’t. 

So here I am, right about the 2 year mark in my service sitting in America, not Burkina.  But I long ago lost my sense of control.  And that’s ok.  I was sent home early due to some medical complications.  Nothing serious but based on standard Peace Corps operating procedures I couldn’t stay in country.  Was this one of the hardest turnarounds in my life?  Well yes.  I was in wrap up mode.  I had just finished an awesome training on animal husbandry with two members of my village, the garden was productive and full of life and it was because of my professors and not myself, our Moringa garden was filling up with trees, and my students had picked up on all the zany ways I teach leading to a great rapport.  My village was so proud of the progress they had made and I was ready to simply “be”. Just live out my last few months in village, die a little from the heat, plant my fields, and take time to say good bye to this little village that I had spent the last two years of my life filling with myself.  And then it was gone.  And no matter which way I try to look at this one in my head it hurts.  This is not how I planned it; this is not how it was supposed to happen.  But I have taken my time to grieve, it was hard, but I can’t fix my situation by looking for a reason why, Burkina taught me that.  I can just accept that it happened and then I have to let go, because that’s life.  And now I take the next step in my life knowing that loss like this is inevitable and scarily enough it happens to somebody every single day.

So we have no control.  What does this mean?  Well I don’t have an answer for you, and if that was what you were reading for then stop now. I command you.  Or don’t.  What it means to me is that our lives and our decisions are a product of so much more than just us.   Any decision that we make has been informed by the culture groups that we occupy and even when we have an original thought or idea there were a lot of moving pieces that contributed to our arrival at this decision.  We operate within an unstable system and there are multi-trillion dollar industries that exist for the sole purpose of making us think what we think and no matter how hard we work in life to create our legacy, to amass things, to control, that can all disappear in one single second.  And that takes different forms for different people.  A poor medical diagnosis, a surprise medical bill, an unplanned pregnancy, a terrorist attack, a drone strike, a failed class, the list goes on and occupies a huge spectrum from tiny to life changing, but that should just impress upon us the vastness of the world and what our place in it looks like this.  So what do we do in the face of the terrifying possibility that any of us could lose everything at any moment? I don’t know.  But I do know that I should stop using the collective “we” because that’s annoying.  Well what do I do?  Let go.  I look back at my service and while I lost a lot of myself when my service was ended before I was ready I find it more telling to look at what wasn’t lost.  While there I made some of the closest friends I have ever had in life.  And whether I had stayed until July or left when I did their lives will be different for having known me and my life will be different for having known them.  While my presence in Burkina individually probably didn’t do much to change the overall trajectory of their country’s development I can at least take pride in knowing that I participated in a group that worked with Burkina to make a better future for Burkina and America both.  And having seen how much a group truly affects the individuals within it I can be thankful for all of the people and groups that have surrounded me my entire life that have helped develop me into the person that I am today.

I don’t really see this as the end of my service.  More the next step.  The things we learn as volunteers don’t have to stop just because we aren’t abroad anymore.  In fact just the opposite.  When we got to Burkina we were a collection of naive enthusiastic Americans who had to spend our whole first year learning how to apply what we knew into a Burkinabé cultural context and now it’s time to try to take what we learned in Burkina and try to apply it to an American Cultural context.  We learned how to cultivate a passion, what kind of day to day work it takes to work towards a long term goal, how to share, how teach by example, how to listen, how to appreciate those around us and how to let a village know you care about them without ever saying a word.  We learned a new way of life, we learned new languages, we learned new eating habits, and we learned a lot of things about ourselves that can only be learned when all the extra stuff in life has been stripped away.  And these are all things that contribute to an amazing Peace Corps service, but are also things that volunteers should work to bring back to the lives in America.  We just have to spend some time translating what we learned into an American context.

Having said all of this I can safely say that I haven’t finished learning from my service.  Partly because of how abruptly I had to leave.  But also I believe that some lessons can’t be learned until we have leave and have the chance to look at them in a different light. My friends in village probably taught me more than I ever managed to teach them, but that’s the nature of the service.  I will probably carry my time in Burkina for the rest of my life and that’s something pretty special.  In that vain I will actually take this opportunity to let you, my dedicated readers, know that I will actually be keeping up with my blog as I reacclimatize to life in America.  And yes I know there are probably only 5 people who read this thing regularly.  But as I spend more time with my friends and family in America I find myself responding to questions that I never thought to ask and remembering stories that I had forgotten meant a lot to me.  Some of them hilarious, some of them thought provoking, and some of them pretty stupid.  But being back has given me the space to take a second look at some of those memories and they look a lot different when you’re this far from the dust and the heat.  So I invite you all to stick around while I try to piece my stories and memories into coherent and meaningful narrative that might capture better my time in the Sahel.  Well here’s to the rest of my life and thanks for sticking around during my two years of service in Burkina Faso.

So once PC has decided to medically evacuate you they don't really leave you with much time to get process, it's just go go go.  So I had one full day to essentially close out two years of my life.  Address my projects, leave instructions, pack my home, pass pets on to new owners, and try to say good bye to an entire village.  If it sounds impossible that's because it was.  But here is my disheveled self on my last morning in village as two of my students (top photo yellow shirts left to right) Aimé and Etienne came to see my off and my best friend Christoph rode with me to the bus station (stretch of road 200m from my house..."bus station" makes it sound so official)